Political Memes

I live in a very, very rural part of the country. Land is CHEAP; you can buy 100+ acres of forest for under $2000/acre. There are a lot of vacant houses. Why? Because no one wants to live here. (Obviously not no one, since I chose to move here, but still.) There aren't jobs locally; part of the price I pay for living where I want to live is spending 3+ hours in a car commuting each day. The vacant houses are vacant because the people that lived there either died, or moved because they couldn't get work. They're not vacant because some venture capital real estate company is buying up rural homes just to hold on to them as they rot away.

The issue isn't vacant housing; the issue is where the housing is, and whether it's actually habitable or not.

It's fueled by greed and the desire to control others.

how much food gets thrown away just because it isn't picturesque?

I've tried growing tomatoes, and bub let me tell you, they look nothing like the pristine samples you find in grocery stores

I hate it here. We have answers to all of life's problems, and yet we humans continue to choose the hard way.

https://www.misfitsmarket.com/

Buy food that was rejected because of its appearance. It's super cheap, it slows food waste, and it helps out a small company.

We should be intercepting the landfill

What’s also weird is that if you want to get rid of perfectly good things nobody wants it or anyplace that might be able to use it makes it prohibitively difficult to get it to them. Got a functional fridge? Sure, you haul it out of your house, rent a truck, take it to the receiver - oh, and it can’t be more than 10 years old.

I find these posts that complain about waste kinda performative. While they’re not wrong, they ignore the logistical issues, both deliberate and indirect, of getting those things to the people that actually need them.

FWIW I’ve found that putting a “curb alert” for free good items with pictures and a location works pretty well. Some industrious person will usually pick something decent up 75% of the time.

Capitalism working as designed

The liars who pushed “there isn’t enough for everyone” aren’t pushing it much anymore. They’ve moved on to saying “not everyone deserves basic human needs”—which is what they really thought all along.

Because the two thousand child raping and killing men who rule over us have deemed it so

We produce enough food to feed everyone, it's just that it's not profitable to do so because the rich are greedy ghouls.

The abundence argument seems written by people who do not produce anything.

I don't think abundence arguments help the left. I raise fruit. I lose fruit to animals and weather. There is variability in the amount of fruit I produce. I often produce more than I can consume, but the logistics of getting the fruit to someone else doesn't work out and the fruit rots. Some years I lose my fruit blossoms to frost.

I have family that work potatoes for a commercial operation. There were a bunch of potatoes that were too big to sell commercially. The operation left the potatoes to rot in the field. My relative bagged potatoes and brought them to family in the old gift economy fashion.

What is the abundence economy argument really about? Are you going to buy bird pecked fruit or C'thulu looking potatoes? Country folk trim off the bad spots. City folk often haven't gotten their hands dirty.

I'm all for anarchy and communism. That means doing some real work and not just reaping the surpluses of capitalism. Chop some wood, it'll do you good and be a good neighbor.

Capitalism depends on violence and deprivation to keep labor desperate and exploitable.

These thimble deep hot takes are annoying.

Is there waste in the system... Yeah. It's also worth noting there has never been a zero waste supply chain or distribution system under any economic system or government.

Centrallia PA had a lot of vacant houses for years. 500+ over about 4 decades. Nobody seemed to want them on account of the giant underground coal fire randomly collapsing the terrain and spewing toxic gasses. What a waste of good housing am I right?

Or check out some of the offerings around Amboy CA. You can get a vacant house and 5 acres in twenty nine palms for 18 grand.

https://www.trulia.com/home/78701-ramona-dr-twentynine-palms-ca-92277-299170461

The storage unit business is still booming, growing at over 7% annually in NA.
We have so much shit we have to rent units offsite to store our shit.